Performance Max uses Google AI to help you drive growth in conversions and value through bidding, targeting, creatives, and attribution. It's designed to perform across a wide range of marketing objectives and media channels. Because of this, we recommend using the following best practices to help set up your Performance Max campaigns for retail advertisers for success and optimal results.
This article explains best practices for Performance Max campaigns for retail advertisers with online sales goals using a Merchant Center feed.
For additional best practices, review:
- Best practices for all business types
- Best practices for online sales (non-shopping)
- Best practices for lead generation
- Best practices for store goals
Campaign set up
- Campaign duration: Run campaigns for at least 6 weeks to allow Google AI time to ramp up and curate sufficient data to compare performance.
- Audience signal: Performance Max is powered by Google AI. Use relevant audience lists as signals to speed up Google AI ramp-up and enhance your campaign’s results. Use remarketing lists, custom intent, Customer Match, and similar segments as signals.
Testing Performance Max campaigns
- Campaign prioritization: Performance Max campaigns will be prioritized over existing Smart Shopping campaigns that run the same products in the same account. When your Performance Max campaign starts to run, the spend in those shopping campaigns will significantly decrease (regardless of budget breakdown), and Performance Max will ramp up in its place.
- Budget: To minimize performance issues, we recommend setting similar budgets for your Performance Max campaigns to those of your existing Smart Shopping campaigns to ensure Performance Max can ramp up to capture previous shopping inventory.
- Pausing campaigns: After your Performance Max campaign is up and running, we recommend pausing your Smart Shopping campaign to ensure Performance Max can successfully take it over completely.
- Ramp-up time: Your Performance Max campaign may take 2-3 days to ramp up and take over the Smart Shopping Campaign inventory entirely.
Listing group overlap
- We recommend that each asset group target different products (for example, Products A-L in Asset Group 1 and Products M-Z in Asset Group 2).
